The four pillars of digital transformation

Partnering with Auxilion will help your organisation transform and develop new capabilities.  Accelerate responsiveness, improve service levels and reduce costs with optimised processes with digital transformation.

We have identified four key pillars of digital transformation that are an important part of a company’s journey to digitally transforming.  The organisation must engage customers by giving them what they want, empower employees by giving them the tools to collaborate and optimise operations to quickly turn customer insights into action.  This should run in parallel to transforming products and services.

Pillar 1.  Engage your customers

Companies must tap into new sources of customer insight and use it to fuel more personalised, seamless customer engagement. Interpreting data will empower and engage your organisation.  Being more engaged with customers includes predicting what customers want even before they know themselves. It also includes giving customers new and more natural ways to relate to your company. Consumers are savvier than ever and are using various technologies such as chat bots and voice search in their personal lives. They expect this level of innovation and simplified interaction in all areas of their lives.

Pillar 2. Empower Your Employees

Employees across all levels and business silos must be given the tools to work and collaborate, especially between product and customer-facing groups.

Leave nothing to chance

Call it luck or serendipity, but when you discover a solution or product that solves a problem in your organisation, it is positive. Rather than relying on serendipity, you should be able to use your organisational analytics to solve a problem for the customer before it arises.

Growing volumes of data offers a promise of greater insight but accessing and making sense of the information can be nearly impossible. Digital transformation can help your business harness this myriad of data as a strategic asset, shifting it ‘from hindsight to foresight’.

Workplace Engagement

Organisations have an opportunity to empower their people and help them execute their jobs more efficiently by re-engaging with them and transforming the work environment itself.

Successful businesses leverage the power of mobility to empower collaboration from anywhere, on any device, providing easy access to the apps and data they need, while mitigating security risks.

They draw insights and make decisions based on business metrics in living, dynamic dashboards, and leverage the power of social conversation to keep a pulse on employee sentiment.

Pillar 3. Optimise Your Operations

Internal operations must be augmented to ensure that companies can quickly turn product and customer insights into action.  This will help serve the customer faster and predict customer trends.

The first step is to get data and applications into the Cloud. Moving data and applications into the Cloud delivers abundant benefits such as lower costs and increased computing scalability, flexibility, management simplicity and availability.

Virtual servers, instant capacity

Microsoft realised the power of the Cloud with its ‘Movies & TV’ service.  Microsoft moved the entire 140,000-title video library into Azure.  This move improved streaming quality, increased the speed of new titles releases and optimised video delivery in different parts of the world.

If the business needs to add capacity to serve more video, it can double its serving capacity in minutes versus the days or weeks needed to provision servers on premises. This enables the service to meet peak demand at a lower cost and to expand its server infrastructure in keeping with business growth.

Cloud savings

Moving its streaming infrastructure to the cloud also enabled Microsoft Movies & TV to save money. Using Azure allows the organisation to focus its staff and budget on innovations and activities that make it more competitive rather than on the day-to-day work of running a data centre.  With competitors such as Netflix in the market, this competitive edge is very necessary.

The technology is not especially glamorous (pushing workhorse servers from your own data centre to a third-party data centre), but even that move gives the business exciting new capabilities that enabled it to be more agile in a hyper-competitive marketplace.

Operational efficiency

Once data and applications are in the Cloud, organisations can take operational efficiency to the next level, beyond knowing what’s happening now in their business to anticipating what will happen next.  These insights are generated using Azure ‘Machine Learning’ predictive analytics, Azure IoT Suite and Cortana Intelligence Suite. When collective data is fed into advanced analytics systems, new insights emerge to drive improvements.

Organisations in manufacturing, retail and a host of other industries can shift from merely reacting to events to responding in real time, or even pre-emptively anticipating and solving customer issues before they become issues.